The Wesleyan chapel was erected in 1875, at a cost of £700, and there is also a Congregational chapel.
The Wesleyan Methodist Church was the name used by the major Methodist movement in Great Britain following its split from the Church of England after the death of John Wesley and the appearance of parallel Methodist movements. "Wesleyan" was added to the title to differentiate it from the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, founded by George Whitefield who like Wesley and his brother Charles had been a member of the Holy Club in Oxford to which the (originally derogatory) epithet "Methodist" was first applied, and from the Primitive Methodist movement which separated from the Wesleyans in 1807.[1] The Wesleyan Methodist Church followed the Wesleys in holding to an Arminian theology, as against Whitefield's Calvinism; its Conference was also the legal successor to John Wesley as holders of the property of the original Methodist Societies.[2]
The title "Wesleyan Methodist Church" remained in use until the Methodist Union of 1932, when the church re-united with the Primitive Methodist Church and the United Methodist Church to form the current Methodist Church of Great Britain.
Wesleyanism, or Wesleyan theology, is a movement of Protestant Christians who seek to follow the "methods" or theology of the eighteenth-century evangelical reformers, John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley, and the theological system inferred from the Wesleys' (and the Wesleys' contemporary coadjutors' such as John William Fletcher) various sermons, theological treatises, letters, journals, diaries, hymns, and other spiritual writings.
At its heart, the theology of John Wesley stressed the life of Christian holiness: to love God with all one’s heart, mind, soul and strength and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. See also Ministry of Jesus. Wesley’s teaching also stressed experiential religion and moral responsibility.[1]
Wesleyanism, manifest today in Methodist and holiness churches, is named for its founders; the Wesleys. In 1736, these two brothers traveled to the Georgia colony in America as missionaries for the Church of England; they left rather disheartened at what they saw. Both of them subsequently had "religious experiences", especially John in 1738, being greatly influenced by the Moravian Christians. They began to organize a renewal movement within the Church of England to focus on personal faith and holiness. John Wesley took Protestant churches to task over the nature of sanctification, the process by which a believer is conformed to the image of Christ, emphasizing New Testament teachings regarding the work of God and the believer in sanctification. The movement did well within the Church of England in Britain, but when the movement crossed the ocean into America, it took on a form of its own, finally being established as the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784. The Wesleyan churches are very similar to Anglicanism (in Church government and liturgical practices), yet have added a strong emphasis on personal faith and personal experience.